The centralisation of treasury and payment functions can create many challenges, including:

• managing several banking relationships
• handling different payment standards
• accommodating manual processes for multiple payment types

To help with these problems SWIFT has opened up its network so that corporates can now implement a single platform to exchange financial information with their banks. To maximise the benefits of this service corporates need to consider how to:

• rationalise their proprietary banking software
• achieve STP of payments and statement information
• transform file formats to the single SWIFT standard
• improve cash management visibility and working capital management